In the preparation of a large bird for sale it is standard to cut the bird up after slaughter into several pieces. A turkey is cleaned by removing the viscera and then rinsing the animal. Then the bird is hung from a conveyor chain which moves it through a plurality of stations at which pieces are cut off it, it is deboned, and so on. Clearly this process requires a substantial amount of manual work and has the considerable disadvantage that the quality of the end product depends directly on the abilities of the people doing the various steps. Furthermore, a normally significant amount of meat is left hanging on the body or lodged in cavities thereof.
The general morphology of a fowl is comprised generally as follows:
The front end of the thorax is closed by a bony architecture defined by the vertebral column, the base of the neck of the animal, the clavicles, and the coracoids. PA1 The central part of the body is defined by the vertebral column, the ribs, and the sternum. PA1 The rear part of the more or less concave pelvis ending in the pygostyle and the ischium includes joint regions for the femurs as well as the iliac fossae.
Because of the complexity of this structure it is very difficult to completely separate the meat from the skeleton.
As a result of this complexity the known cutting or meat-stripping machines remove the wings, thighs, and filets, that is the large masses of breast meat, in separate operations. Some of the better pieces are not removed carefully, for example a part of the meat forming the filet can rest on the respective thigh so that each of the pieces is worth somewhat less than it should. The result is therefore that sloppy stripping costs the meat-packing operation in lost profit.
On the other hand the known methods and apparatuses, whether manual or automatic have various limitations. The main problem is that they require that the bird be held by a through-going rod which gets in the way of many meat- or part-removing operations. Furthermore the known systems normally require that the filets be removed on a separate machine altogether and in any case it is difficult to adapt the known systems to birds of different sizes.